The car business is ruthless, and no amount of love for a brand matters if it can’t justify its existence. We’ve lost so many legends over the years, from Studebaker and Packard to AMC and Pontiac. But let’s say that you’ve met a genie, and he’s willing to grant you the wish of bringing any automaker you want back to life. But the catch is that you have to kill an existing automaker, any automaker, to make it happen. What carmaker would you destroy to reincarnate another?
To make this question a bit harder, I’m already disqualifying one answer for being too easy. I expect a ton of people to say that they would end Buick to save Pontiac. While normally a valid answer, I want to see my fellow Autopians get really creative here. What’s a brand that isn’t Buick that you’d cease to bring Pontiac back, for example?
I’m just young enough that most of the brands I remember dying are many of the once-great domestic brands that withered throughout the 2000s before being sent to live on a farm upstate. I’ve seen the loss of greats like Saab, Saturn, Oldsmobile, Mercury, Coda, Corbin, Fisker (twice), Plymouth, Local Motors, Lordstown, and others. I’ve also seen some brands fail to launch or sell many copies, like Elio and Lordstown. We technically even lost Checker Motors in the 2000s.
If I were to save a brand, I’d bring back Saturn, but specifically the version from the 1990s. Saturn was such a fresh take from General Motors. Its cars were cheap to buy, frugal to run, stylish, and shockingly durable. Saturn dealers didn’t force you to haggle, and the brand tried its best to treat customers like family, not just walking sacks of money.
As a kid and then later a teenager, I always saw the Saturns from the 1990s as looking like plastic spaceships. I adored the goofy huge steering wheels, the simple instrumentation, and beige interiors. As an adult, I still find myself appreciating a ’90s Saturn that’s still kicking.
That’s not to say that the 2000s Saturns were bad. One of my bucket list cars is a second-generation Vue in that neat color-shifting bluish paint. Of course, I also own a yellow Saturn Sky Red Line, one of my all-time dream cars. But I think Saturn’s greatest hits were a bit earlier.
The hard question would be what brand I’d zap out of existence to bring Saturn back. If you forced me to eliminate a current General Motors brand, I think I would choose GMC. Now, I know this is a hot take, especially since the combined truck sales of Chevrolet and GMC make General Motors the biggest pickup truck provider in America. However, does GMC actually need to be an entirely separate brand to achieve this?
Ford has proven that you can sell standard pickup trucks and luxury pickup trucks under one brand name. Likewise, GMC itself has shown that you can shove brand names into other brand names, like Hummer, and people won’t seem to care that much. I bet if it absolutely needed to, General Motors could figure out how to get Chevrolet and GMC to co-exist. Had GMC still been the home of GM’s heavy trucks and buses, I’d feel differently, but those times are now behind us.
If I could open the floor to destroy any brand to save Saturn, I would have to pour one out for Faraday Future. Honestly, it’s hard to fathom just what Faraday Future is even up to. The brand’s sole production car has possibly the worst trim names in the business: FF 91 2.0 Futurist Alliance, FF 91 2.0 Futurist, and FF 91 2.0, and the company seems far more interested in making AI robots than cars, anyway.
Let us also not forget that absolutely insane press event Faraday Future had with the AI van with a digital face.
Of course, this is all just for fun. I harbor no ill feelings toward any car brand or any of the fine people who work for them. But if given this opportunity by this overly-specific genie- sorry, Faraday Future. Here’s where I turn things over to you. If you could save one brand at the expense of another, which brands would they be? Again, you can’t save Pontiac by killing Buick.
Our secret designer, The Bishop, says that he would kill Infiniti to bring back Datsun.
Top graphic image: Faraday Future
Hot take while they were still part of Volvo I would have killed Polestar to bring back Saab.
I would kill half of Lexus lineup and bring back Scion
Hear me out I will kill Buick and have GM call up Suzuki and we relaunch GEO and the Jimny is the new Tracker.
Put Chrysler out of it’s misery and bring back AMC 4 wheel drive cars! They were so far ahead of the curve, and deserved to be kept alive and should be brought back!
Kill Lucid, bring back DeLorean.
Does Mitsubishi count as dead? It could very much benefit from bringing it back to its former glory.
The one I’d bring back: Pontiac!
The ones I’d sacrifice to do so: All of them!